Joan Snyder’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac London.
I wanted more in a painting, not less… to have a beginning, a middle, an end, joy and sorrow, and even resolution… to be able in one painting to have all of this. — Joan Snyder
Marking Joan Snyder’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac London will stage the most comprehensive presentation of the American artist’s work outside of the United States to date. Over her career of six decades, Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction, infusing her art with autobiography as she consciously worked against the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged. The result is a pioneering body of work that breaks down social, aesthetic and material hierarchies to assert the place of feeling and female subjectivity within contemporary abstraction. As art historian Hayden Herrera writes, ‘It is this absolute congruence of formal and autobiographical discovery that distinguishes Snyder.’
Featuring more than 30 new and historic paintings, the exhibition traces the evolution of the artist’s practice from 1964 to the present, culminating in eight major new works. Encompassing the guiding principles and themes of her practice, Snyder’s oeuvre is structured around the development of three foundational groups of work: the Stroke paintings – with which she first garnered widespread recognition at the beginning of the 1970s when they were presented in the Whitney Annual Exhibition (1972) and the Whitney Biennial (1973) – the Symphony paintings and Field paintings. Their visual language extends into her expansive body of paintings beyond these categories, recognisable in her most recent works. Arranged chronologically, a pattern of recurring personal motifs emerges throughout the exhibition in a cyclical rhythm of return and renewal, encompassing love, joy, grief and desire expressed through colour, form and gesture in rich, poetic compositions.
The most recent body of work on view, created in 2024, revisits and reimagines the concerns that reverberate across the decades of Snyder’s practice. Impasto roses, straw, controlled drips of paint, breasts and bared teeth, mud and lace sit beside written dedications to literature and family members. Ponds emerge as a central motif in several works, including Painting at the Pond (2024) and Come to Pearl Pond (2024). This new body of work speaks to Snyder’s continued compulsion to engage in painterly experimentation. ‘My painting is my religion,’ she reflects. ‘It’s the altar that I go to and it’s where I face myself and find out who I am.’
Joan Snyder Body & Soul: 28 November - 5 February 2025
Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NJ
Opening hours: Tuesday—Saturday, 10am—6pm
Further Information: Joan Snyder | Body & Soul | Thaddaeus Ropac